The portal for student applications to CUR’s Posters on the Hill program is now open. The event itself will take place virtually in the spring of , 2022 (the date will depend on the agenda of Congress). This is a highly competitive program but very friendly to the arts and humanities. In 2018, for example, only 60 of 409 total submissions made the program, but proposals in the arts and humanities face slightly better odds: four out the seventeen proposals in the humanities were successful! With a little help from you, your students can successfully apply to Posters on the Hill this year!
The application process may not easy for your students. As their mentor you will have an important role. Two items on the CURAH resource page can be helpful: “how to write an abstract” and “how to make a poster.” The latter is particularly useful since posters are not a common form of presentation in the arts and humanities. Fortunately, our disciplines actually provide the background and skills for extremely compelling visual presentations of scholarship and creative activity.
As you help your students apply to Posters on the Hill, keep in mind that the event is partly an exercise in advocacy for undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity. Posters will be seen by Senators, Congressional Representatives, Congressional Staff, officers from the NEH and NEA, and the Press. The selection committee pays careful attention to the interests of your State Representatives. These usually have something to do with the unique resources and economic contributions of your state. But truly excellent and unusual student work on any project has a good chance of success. Don’t let the advocacy issues stop you; make sure your best students apply to Posters on the Hill. Participation is a wonderful opportunity. Students have an opportunity to meet with their Representatives, attend field trips, and hear from speakers who are innovators and supporters of undergraduate research.
Advanced computational tools such as natural language processing and word embedding can often provide excellent opportunities for undergraduate research in the humanities. This summer, a College of the Holy Cross summer research team completed a project titled “A Composite Model for Homeric Scholia Transmission.” Natalie DiMattia, Augusta Holyfield, Rose Kaczmarek, and I explored the little-studied scholia (historical scholarly annotation) of Iliad manuscripts and used natural language processing methods to analyze the topics within them. As part of the project, we have made available for the first time a diplomatic edition of the scholia within Books Eight through Ten of two Iliad manuscripts. Our work demonstrates that the sources of Homeric scholia are varied across manuscripts with no single stemmatic source. In other words, scribes used material creatively instead of simply copying from earlier works.
Holy Cross Research Team: Natalie DiMattia ‘22, Rose Kaczmarek ‘23, Anne-Catherine Schaaf ‘22, and Augusta Holyfield ‘22
Beyond the Stemmatic Model
Previous scholarship assumed a stemmatic model of transmission, with later annotations deriving from earlier ones like branches on a tree, all leading back to singular source. Because we recognized that scribes creatively mixed material from multiple sources, we applied computational methods to identify common units of scholia content. These units have been compressed, expanded, and combined in different manuscripts, making an unrooted network a more accurate model for scholia than a stemmatic tree.
No single method accounts for all the diagnostic features of the scholia: thematic content, technical language, non-linguistic markings on the manuscript, and chronological indications. Therefore, we drew on a variety of natural language processing methods such as TF-IDF, a measure of the proportional importance of words to the document; topic modelling, which identifies recurring clusters of co-occurring terms; and word embeddings, which model sequences of terms. Using this new methodological framework, we created a composite model of the relationships between scholia. The resulting network has no stemmatic family tree, or even one source. Rather, it illustrates an interweaving, two-thousand year scholarly debate about the Iliad.
The MID’s Groundbreaking Work
Our research builds on work my teammates and I have been doing for four years as members of the Holy Cross Manuscripts, Inscriptions, and Documents Club (MID), focusing on the Homer Multitext Project. Part of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, the Homer Multitext Project has consistently engaged with and produced groundbreaking scholarship in Homeric studies. The Holy Cross MID was founded ten years ago, and has been working with the Homer Multitext Project ever since, providing students many summer opportunities to work on these incredible manuscripts. Professor Neel Smith, our faculty mentor, additionally serves as one of the Information Architects for the project. Students have turned their work into senior theses as well as presenting at conferences in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Mexico City, and Krakow.
Beginning in my first year, when I took Introduction to Ancient Greek and joined the club, I learned the foundational skills required to work with these texts. I have continued my work in MID throughout my three years at Holy Cross, as well as continuing on through Advanced Greek, and I have taken on an active role helping see through projects at Hackathon, as well as testing and introducing the new software to other members. In the spring of my sophomore year, I audited a course on archaeological data analysis, which gave me an initial overview of working with digital notebooks and forms of analysis such as topic modelling. My previous summer research allowed me to gain experience with the forms of textual analysis we continued to develop, as well as how to be a more efficient reader and editor of the manuscripts.
Creating New Research Opportunities
This summer, my team and I developed our modeling methods even further by tackling the scholia, a much more complicated corpus. My senior thesis will focus on the theme of weaving on the Iliad and its scholia, and my experience doing research has been invaluable, not just for the technical skills it gave, but in my work directly building and processing the corpus that I will use for my thesis research.
My team received the high honor of having a paper based on our research accepted at the SCS-AIA, the preeminent conference for classics and archaeology in America. The session we will be presenting at, Ancient Makerspaces, is unique among classics conferences for its combination of the classics and digital humanities, and the scholars and presentations there will offer a fascinating introduction to the latest developments in the fields I am most passionate about. The work my team has done will continue throughout the year as we expand our corpora of books of the Iliad, and even though I’m graduating, I’m very excited to see what the next generation of MID scholars at Holy Cross produce.
Anne-Catherine Schaaf is a senior Classics major at the College of the Holy Cross.
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Keeping undergraduate students engaged and energized in ongoing research teams is an activity made more challenging by the need to meet exclusively online. Dr. Nathaniel Stern, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a dual appointment in Art and Mechanical Engineering, shared his experience working with online teams at a recent gathering of the Wisconsin Council on Undergraduate Research (WisCUR). Afterward, CURAH caught up with Dr. Stern to hear a bit more.
CURAH: What has the move to online teams taught you about what students need?
NS: In brief, there are four things my students need: empathy, energy, structure, and materiality. I provide these things through check-ins, “stokes,” schedules, and visual and material engagement.
I should say also that teams of students need these things regardless of present circumstances, but the need has certainly been amplified by having to meet online.
CURAH: Let’s take these one at a time: tell us about empathy.
NS: In terms of empathy, every meeting begins with a prompted sharing exercise: “The best part of my week was . . .” or “I feel up/down about X” or “I am looking forward to Y.” Sometimes I have them arrange what the empathy check-in will be. I participate, too, and we all respond to each other. In addition, I spend a little extra time with each student on rotation. Here, the goal is to make them feel heard and seen.
CURAH: Now, energy—and what are “stokes”?
NS: Stokes are little things we do to inject energy into our gatherings. We have silent dance parties, play Simon Says, throw invisible knives and balls to each other, set up poses and make drawings on our screens. The main goal here: we want to get out of our seats and get excited about what we are doing. Often, we tie this to where we are in the project, to aesthetics or brainstorming for new ideas, that sort of thing.
CURAH: How do you structure your online teams?
NS: We meet weekly, typically in groups of five. We maintain schedules and timelines, core to-do lists, and assignments using Gantt charts, Google sheets, MURAL with virtual sticky notes, and more. We work on these together, and my one or two most senior students take charge. They use these tools to create investment in the whole project, as well as accountability for individual tasks.
CURAH: Tell us what you mean by materiality.
NS: In my mind, it’s related to the stokes we do for energy. We want to remember we have bodies, that we are bodies, and that we make use of them. But this also means paying attention to visual materials and, well, things. We use MURAL for brainstorming frequently because it mimics a physical whiteboard and post-its. We send materials to each other to play with, we sketch and write during our time together as well as on our own, and we share out. In the fine arts, it should be said, we often confuse medium and discipline, so I make clear to my students that matter really does matter here!
One thing that also helps is that I actually make all of this transparent to my students. I let them in on what I am doing and why. I ask them for feedback on what they need. This mirrors how we make decisions about research direction together, and how we decide who works on what.
CURAH: Can you tell us about one of the projects you’re currently working on with student teams?
NS: I am working, in collaboration with artist and director (and UW-M alum) Samantha Tan, on a Zoom-bound documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement, entitled Leverage: Taking Antiracist Action in This Moment. With the coronavirus pandemic also in the background, the film presents how a variety of community members are working hard towards equity. We do not speak for the movement (or its leaders), but rather with diverse voices who are making Black lives matter. We share what they are both learning and doing, in order to ask us all to take action in this moment, and every moment.
CURAH: As we round into the second year of collaborative work constrained by the global pandemic, any last words?
For volume 19, the publication is accepting the following types of submissions by April 16.
original research articles
comments and responses to previous YSW articles
methodological reflections (detailed narrative and reflection about an experience using empirical method that is in conversation with the literature on methods)
Spotlight on First-Year Writing articles (research by students in first-year college writing courses)
The YSW editors are eager to support undergraduate research in writing and rhetoric and are available to Zoom into your classes to discuss research and publication in YSW with your students. Just send an email (youngscholars.editor@gmail.com) to let them know if you’d like to schedule a virtual meeting.
We are fortunate to live at a time when museums and public collections are finally returning objects to the people and cultures from whom they were taken. Colleges and universities, large and small, often have their own collections and will continue to be a part of this process (in some cases the law requires it). As two cases at Albion College make clear, repatriation represents an opportunity for undergraduate research. Activities appropriate for mentored students include reviewing a collection, determining which objects are legitimate subjects of repatriation, and documenting them completely. The actual repatriation process itself requires communication and public relations. Its fruition serves as an important public confirmation and validation of basic research.
NAGPRA requires research
Happily, the law actually requires some research (how often does that happen!) through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) . All museums, federal agencies, colleges, and universities need to compile an inventory of Native American human remains, funerary objects, and summarize other cultural items. No university collections, no matter how small, are exempt, regardless of where the cultural items are physically located. Much of this inventory and summary work is within the capabilities of mentored undergraduates. At Albion College, for example, the inventory and summary research of student Chelsea Adams resulted in identifying a Zuni Ahayu’da, one of twin gods of war.
This 19th century Ahayu’da had been in Albion College’s possession since 1973. It was returned to the Zuni people in a ceremony in 2018.
This was a clear case for repatriation since the Zuni consider any Ahayu’da removed from its shrine (where it retires to decay naturally) as stolen. After documenting the Ahayu’da carefully and following the NAGPRA protocol, it was repatriated in a ceremony on campus involving several Zuni elders.
Repatriation is highly collaborative
Opportunities also exist for repatriation outside of the United States. These are less formally defined than with NAGPRA repatriation, although the process can be more complicated and more collaborative. Archeologist Joel Palka (currently at Arizona State University) was using a collection at Albion College as part of his 2005 book on the Maya and identified an urn whose twin resides in Chiapas, Mexico. In 2016, he collaborated with Albion’s archivist, Justin Seidler, anthropologist Brad Chase, and Albion students to perform an instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) on the urn. Since then, Palka has helped Albion work toward repatriating the urn to Chiapas, along with Josuhé Lozada Toledo, an archaeologist and Professor of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico (INAH).
“Everyone has been extremely excited about the process,” says Meghan Webb, Albion College anthropology professor, “and it has been an encouraging process. All involved also see the repatriation as a process and opportunity to build ongoing relationships.” Webb has been working with student Dulce Aceves on a research project connected with the repatriation, which is expected to conclude in the spring of 2021.
Repatriation is scalable
These cases at Albion College make it clear that repatriation of even a single object is a major project, requiring intensive research and extensive communication. As a result, it’s possible that even small collections can potentially provide ongoing opportunities for undergraduate work. In addition, given the large number of small tasks, repatriation is a potential opportunity for a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), expanding the reach of the experience.
Repatriation is the right thing to do!
Finally, repatriation puts faculty and undergraduate students on the right side of history. The work of repatriation teaches students about the ethics of collections and about the history of Western colonialism and hegemony.
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Exhibitions offer excellent opportunities for undergraduate research especially at the introductory level. But finding appropriate materials to exhibit can be daunting, requiring collaboration with libraries or museums. In addition, established collections are often well studied, leaving a little room for authentic research by undergraduate students. One solution is to acquire items specifically for the purpose of an undergraduate exhibition. A treasure trove of inexpensive minor items, early printed pages, and more modern ephemera is available on auction sites like eBay. With patience and careful attention to ethical issues, it’s possible to assemble and mount an exhibition in your field for less than $500. And the items acquired can remain as part of a college or university’s teaching collection long after the exhibition is over, preserving public access to materials that might otherwise have languished in private collections. Here are some rules of thumb to guide your adventure.
Be flexible.
All exhibitions have a theme or focus, and your expertise will no doubt suggest many ideal items to you. But you will have most success if you bring a flexible and open-minded approach to your search. Items produced in large numbers, or in metal, and pages from large and popular texts are easiest to find and present the fewest ethical issues. (See “Pay Attention to Ethics!” below). Small metal finds from the European Middle Ages include lead pilgrim badges, cloth seals, and seal matrices; from the early modern period, you’ll find Delft tiles; bronze book clasps, and pages from popular works of natural philosophy. Happily, pages that offer the most opportunity for student research, with text as well as images, are usually less expensive than ones with images alone. Modern ephemera include local newspapers, family photo collections and scrapbooks, posters, campaign materials, etc.
Trust your expertise?
Museums care deeply about provenance and authenticity. In part, that is because they are collecting items of great value, where forgery becomes an issue. At the cost point for undergraduate exhibitions, your ordinary scholarly expertise is enough to point you in the right direction. For example, while it is possible for someone to forge a page from Gerard’s Herball (1597), the cost and trouble to do so at the level that would deceive any early modern scholar would not be worth the $6 that such pages often garner. If you’ve spent hours in the archives, you are unlikely to mistake a facsimile for the real thing. Overall, you don’t need to be an art expert in order to demonstrate the level of expertise required for a low-cost undergraduate exhibition. A good rule of thumb is that if you doubt the authenticity, then others will too.
Pay attention to ethical issues!
As anyone involved with museum acquisitions knows, purchasing an artifact always involves a delicate ethical balance. If you use items you acquire in teaching and make them available to the public, you have some strong positive outcomes. But you should take care to minimize the harm caused by participating in the marketplace. The issue is particularly tricky with anything that counts as an antiquity. The Society for American Archaeology’s code of ethics generally forbids participation in the market for antiquities because it creates incentives for looting. If you’re a purist, you may extend this even to existing private collections and to objects that have always been extant. Raising the ethical issues can also be a legitimate part of the pedagogy of your undergraduate research experience.
Consider both the cost of the item and its origin. A low cost may seem unlikely to encourage irresponsible behavior. But for items from developing countries, prices that may seem low to you can still be incentives to loot. Some countries, however, strictly monitor (and permit) the collection of minor objects. In the UK, for example, metal detector finds are documented in a public database, and the Treasure Act and national monument laws protect cultural heritage.
Avoid beauty. Prefer damaged, broken, and incomplete minor items. Objects and texts that are perfect or aesthetically pleasing are important cultural heritage, if authentic. Broken pottery fragments might be OK (but no guarantees). The frieze of the Parthenon is not.
For pages from texts, consider the cost of the page against the value of a complete text. You can usually check this using records from sites like abebooks or auction sites. Don’t buy individual pages for a price that might encourage collectors to destroy undamaged books.
Do not acquire items from indigenous cultures or their ancestors.
Save some of your budget to mount your exhibition.
Creating secure and attractive exhibitions requires some thought to presentation, and that comes with its own costs. Individual pages can be mounted using swing-out plexiglas with nothing more than some brass hardware, a hand drill, and a screwdriver. (NB: Consider UV resistant plexiglas for long-term or sunlit installations). Three dimensional items might require collaborating with someone who has basic carpentry skills. The low cost nature of your items should make you less anxious about theft or vandalism and thus open up more potential semi-protected exhibition spaces.
Consider future teaching uses.
Exhibitions offer great course-based undergraduate research experiences, but consider collections that can be used in teaching long after the exhibition is taken down. Simple classroom assignments can motivate students when they have the chance to handle historical material.
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If there is any silver lining for undergraduate research during the Coronavirus pandemic, it lies in way virtual meetings have expanded possibilities for connecting artists and scholars across the globe. Kylee Turner, an Art History student at University State University, was able to take advantage of this trend to radically extend the interviews she planned as part of a project on contemporary printmaking. CURAH recently caught up to Kylee, virtually of course.
CURAH: What was the nature of your project?
KT: My URCO research is a combination of my two passions, film and printmaking. I’m recording interviews with printmakers from all around the world to capture the rich history and energy around the art form. I will use the footage and information I gather to make an energetic and informational documentary about printmaking.
Kylee Turner, Utah State University
CURAH: What were the easiest and hardest things about the work you did?
KT: The easiest part of my project has been staying motivated, no matter the changes that have come due to the state of the world. I want to learn what my interviewees have to teach me and I’m excited to share that information with others. Printmaking is a largely community-based art. There is a really passionate group of people that are excited about the work they are doing and want to bring others in to share the magic that lies within the process. I am thrilled at the idea of capturing that and hopefully letting new people experience the intense passion that comes with making. My desire to do this, and do this well, brings in the biggest stressor and most difficult part of this project. There is no book on “How to Make a Documentary on Zoom” and I don’t know how my final product is going to look compared to what I had originally planned.
CURAH: What kinds of things did you learn? (about your topic, about scholarship, or about yourself)
KT: Undertaking such a massive project has pushed the bounds of the small world that I thought I lived in. I had planned on visiting artists in Utah, Idaho, and the surrounding states based on availability of artists. My grant money included a travel fund that I was going to use to get to Florida to speak to artist that had a different background and setting. This, to me, was a fairly broad stroke I was going to use to try and paint a very complicated picture. Now, Zoom has allowed me to complete interviews with artists from all over America as well as Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Hong Kong. The reality of being able to paint a global picture of printmaking has been huge for my research and really solidified the idea of scholarship to me. Reaching out to big names—people in the MOMA, artists making waves, printmakers inventing processes—it all seemed out of reach before this. Now, it’s reality.
CURAH: Did you make any discoveries along the way?
KT: Researching in my field of study has been eye opening on many fronts. Hearing from so many passionate and active artist has help keep my personal practice of printmaking alive. I’ve learned simple ideas to share printmaking with more people and complex technical skills that I hadn’t heard of before. While this might not directly show in the documentary, learning new things proves how expansive this field is. There’s so much to be excited about and dive into. I’m reminded with each interview I conduct that this is a worthwhile topic and that there is something here to share with the world.
CURAH: How has the project helped you in your career goals?
KT: In video, one of the greatest strengths you need while applying for jobs is a strong reel of work. While I’ve been working on video projects throughout my university career, this is different than anything I’ve had the chance to make. It will help me prove my film skills to future employers but, more importantly, my ability to adapt and overcome roadblocks in the creative process. This project is a proof of my ability to plan, shoot, produce, and problem solve effectively. While it hasn’t landed me my dream job yet, I’ve still got a lot of work to do before I’m finished here.
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Creative writing student Liam Strong and faculty mentor Julie Gard reflect on the challenges and joys of working together remotely at the University of Wisconsin-Superior during the Pandemic.
A Student Perspective – Liam Strong
A Frigid Spring
I had planned on celebrating Pride Month in June 2020 like I would any other year. I’d made a lot of plans, but I’d never accounted for a pandemic. The arrival of COVID-19, however, didn’t halt my one stationary plan of completing my Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) through the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
As a distance learning student, I had already constructed the skeleton of my project online. Working with my mentor and professor, Julie Gard, I planned to write a poetry chapbook manuscript (16-25 pages) by August. Or at least that’s what Julie insisted I do instead of the full-length manuscript I had initially challenged myself with. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the finished chapbook is practically devoid of its influence.
What the pandemic didn’t change was how politically charged the manuscript ended up being. Pride Month wasn’t going to happen once the Black Lives Matters protests began this summer, and they informed the outspoken nature of the manuscript. The pandemic didn’t change the experiments I did with poetic forms, nor with language, nor my hopes for the project.
If anything, isolation brought me closer to myself and my identity, which wasn’t planned at all.
Content, Themes, Meditations
Truth be told, the original title of the project, Like a Body From Blood, was a placeholder. Because the project’s themes began broadly, they weren’t fully realized until almost halfway through the summer. I wanted to write a set of poems about the non-binary experience, about grappling with one’s gender dysphoria. I wanted to celebrate queerness, existing in a sometimes bizarre transgender body and mind, and not be angry.
The poems are sad and indignant (in a mutedly poetic way) because I found myself in everything I had compiled for my Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship project’s reading list. I hadn’t planned on writing poems dealing so much with my body image, with every one of my multitudes. I’m the only one who will say the manuscript is about insecurities.
Books from Liam’s reading list.
Thematically, what started as my exploration into theorizing non-binary poetics then became a narrative. After reading Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, I knew there were roads to my gender fluidity, masculinity, femininity, my physical vulnerability. My emotional vulnerability. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It. reached out to hold me because it knew my pain, my joys, my place in the world. I realized with that book my manuscript needed to do the same.
Workshopping Poems and Myself
I’d often be distracted trying to read the titles of the dozens of poetry books behind Julie’s head while we discussed my poems and readings via Zoom. I’d hear her dog, Nikolai, lawnmowers and endless road construction, or her partner coming home while we workshopped at her outdoor office. I tried, however, not to be distracted by my own expectations toward how I had been writing before the project began.
My weekly poem drafts were unlike any I had written before—largely due to Julie’s feedback and my propulsion to do something different. I was tired of being comfortable, especially with writing the fine-tuned poetic line, and in turn focusing on crafting an evocative, personally charged line. Though not every single poem I wrote took on a specific poetic form, every poem had form in that it was written with purpose in mind. I wrote poems in conversation with the content of my weekly readings; poems in response to another poet’s poem; long narrative poems that were unlike the tight, brief poems I typically wrote.
I could see my body in every poem. Each poem had bones, flesh, genitals, and a name that didn’t fit their visage. The poems were all searching for belonging, and I just didn’t know it yet.
An Audience of One vs. An Audience of Many
Many authors and teachers of writing suggest that one should always write for themselves. At the end of summer 2020, my SURF project implored the opposite. Although most, if not all, the poems in the final manuscript are “about” me, they are not for me.
I titled the chapbook Likeness. Once we had begun composing the list of poems that would make it into the projected order of the manuscript, we realized that the themes extended beyond gender identity and toward kinship, toward finding likeness in others. I wasn’t writing for myself, but rather for people who didn’t have a literature to call their own. Though there isn’t a dedications page, the manuscript is for all transgender, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary individuals. As someone who grew up without any non-binary poetry to see myself in, it became my goal to ensure that others could see themselves in my experiences as a person of gender and sexual diversity.
Certain Uncertainties
Having endured the pandemic thus far, I can’t help but regard the toll it’s taken on my mental health in conjunction with a 200-hour fellowship project. There were days where I didn’t want to look at a poem, then days where all I wanted to indulge in were literature podcasts, poetry collections, and my personal free-writes. There were days where I felt like a boy, days where I was a girl, days where I didn’t want to be clearly defined by a binary. Although many poems over the course of the summer were undoubtedly fun to write (particularly those in response to Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities), others became therapeutic. As in, I may not have been ready yet to tackle their emotional baggage.
Bouts of dysphoria would hit me, but during those times the best strategy for coping was gardening. Hours spent picking weeds, trimming bushes, and topping begonias became a necessary reprieve from not only the difficult personal content of my poems but also the social climate of America.
That all said, I won’t discount the newfound relationship I now have with writing and workshopping poems. The workshops Julie and I held weren’t simply devoted to constructive criticism and revision—our workshops were more like discussions of poetic intent, considering how to best fulfill the then uncertain themes of the chapbook. Uncertainty offered so much to me, despite my evasion of it. I may not have found my true self with all these poems, but that was never the point. I will always continually find myself. I have a lifetime of poems ahead of me to write, and this summer of writing has been the bridge between me and the poetics I want to see more of in the world.
Liam Strong and Julie Gard, hard at work.
A Faculty Perspective – Julie Gard
Writer at Work
Liam’s apartment had white walls, comfortable couches, and a cat. Bookshelves, a washing machine, lamps, and warm light. Outside of the Zoom frame in which much of our mentorship transpired, they described gardening and working in the dirt. I loved to imagine this companion experience to a summer of reading and writing poetry–the tangible digging, planting, and growing. I have never been to Traverse City, Michigan, so their life outside of the apartment was an imaginary space for me. I knew they lived on the third floor, so I pictured them in a fortress up in the air, safe to take on poetic form and the false gender binary.
Set-up and Structure
Liam and I have never met in person; they were a student in my online, advanced poetry workshop in Spring 2020, which is where I got to know their writing and work ethic, sensing they would be a perfect candidate for a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. Our remote mentorship was not a response to the pandemic, but this format certainly turned out to be convenient.
Structure is important whenever a faculty member is accompanying a student on their journey with an independent project, and Liam and I worked together to set up a framework ahead of time, with the understanding that we could tweak it. In the late spring, we developed a timeline that included weekly readings and due dates. We committed to meeting once a week throughout the summer, with these meetings scheduled as “recurring” in Zoom and on both of our Outlook calendars. In between meetings, we agreed to check in over email if any questions or challenges came up.
In terms of our mentorship medium, video meetings have limitations but can be extremely effective as a space in which to discuss creative writing, especially when accompanied by written feedback and exchange. I think of the long tradition of epistolary mentorships between writers, and between writers and editors. In many ways, writing is a well-suited discipline for long-distance work, and adding a face-to-face element, even if virtual, adds another layer of richness.
A Flexible Pedagogy
As a mentor, my role is to help a highly motivated and well-prepared student set up a framework in which they can work independently on a significant project and make discoveries. Providing structure while giving up control is somewhat like teaching a course where the student authors or co-authors the course objectives. In a mentorship of this kind, often the “course objectives” become more focused as the project continues. I now see creative project mentoring as occupying a space between an advanced college writing course and the life-long work of a professional poet. I strive to equip the student with the skills and framework to pursue in-depth creative projects independently in the future.
I know from my own experience with writing mentors such as George Barlow at Grinnell College, and Valerie Miner and Julie Schumacher at the University of Minnesota, that encouragement and praise can very much coexist with questioning, suggesting, and looking deeply into a work. Taking someone’s writing seriously helps them to grow, as does modeling a state of curiosity. This is not a project of dismantling or asserting dominance, but rather of working with a highly engaged student as a collaborator. What is the student curious about? How does this overlap with what I’m curious about? How can a recommendation for revision or further development truly be a suggestion that the student has the freedom to take or leave?
Logistics in Illogical Times
Each weekly meeting began with a general check-in, acknowledging our lives as human beings outside the scope of the project. The social unrest across the country, and in our own cities and states, was often part of the conversation, including how we were responding to and finding ourselves influenced by it. This check-in was followed by a discussion of the week’s reading, and then Liam’s poem drafts for the week and my feedback. Liam provided me with their draft work a couple of days ahead of time so I could prepare feedback, and we could discuss the draft together from an informed place.
At the beginning of the summer, the focus was on individual poems. As the summer progressed, our lens expanded to include, usually at the end of the session, a discussion of the overall manuscript and how it was shaping up. We considered how the poems might interact with each other and themes that were emerging, some expected and some unexpected.
Liam chose the reading list for this project, and it was exciting to read these new-to-me works and become familiar with the growing body of poetry by trans and gender-fluid writers, and to learn about the growing field of trans poetics. As a cisgender, queer person in her forties, I was grateful to have my world expanded in this way. My experience is an illustration of the personal and intellectual growth that is one of the rewards of mentoring.
Web of Connections
Liam completed this project during a time of social and political unrest, in the context of a world-wide pandemic. Both of us acknowledged the stress of these circumstances. Two important coping mechanisms were acknowledgment and integration: making space to discuss how we were impacted by these events, and also allowing them to become part of the summer’s writing.
There were few challenges in terms of the logistics and structure of the internship itself. Technology worked well, and the framework we set up, with some tweaks as the summer went on, also proved effective. Liam completed two versions of a polished, powerful final manuscript. It was deeply rewarding to watch Liam become part of an important literary conversation, sharing their own truth with and among creative peers and kindred spirits.
At our university’s Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium, held virtually in October, I had the opportunity to watch Liam give a powerful reading of several of their project poems. Audience members expressed a heartfelt connection to and admiration for their work. On a personal level, it was rewarding through this mentorship to expand my knowledge of trans poetics, and in turn my own sense of queer community and creative possibility.
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Assignments that allow students to conduct original research for publication in humanities-focused digital repositories help make classroom learning concrete. And since public-facing projects serve the larger scholarly community, student participants can recognize themselves as valued members of that community. Yet, as Ian F. MacInnes rightly observes in his tips for for “Building Community in Online Classes,” it can sometimes take years for these contributions to see the light of day. The delay is due to the time and labor required for peer-review and copyediting. Student contributions often need a lot of both. Moreover, because these tasks frequently fall upon professors, some may be discouraged from offering such opportunities at all.
One solution is to make contributions to major digital humanities sites the subject of collaboration across multiple courses and semesters. Such collaboration in undergraduate research has a force multiplying effect. It makes the work of peer-review and editing visible, and it underscores the value of contributions at each stage of the publication process.
An Embarrassment of Riches
In my experience working with The Map of Early Modern London, a DH project featuring seven interoperable databases, and directing the Kit Marlowe Project, a student-generated digital repository for studying early modern literature, I frequently found myself overwhelmed by the volume of student-generated content. All of it required extensive fact-checking and editorial work. This problem came to a head as I prepared to launch the Kit Marlowe Project at the 2018 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) Annual Meeting. I needed to review students’ TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding projects and web exhibits. And I had roughly twenty-five encyclopaedia entries that were enthusiastically long-winded and sometimes slipped into pure conjecture. Their bibliographies also needed additional work. The students’ contributions represented great effort but were clearly not ready for publication.
Initially, I took on the job of checking and copy-editing myself. Alas, I soon realized the process was unsustainable. But what if we extended project collaboration beyond a single semester?
A Solution Benefits Project–and Students
In Spring 2018, prior to the (SAA) meeting, I tested this hypothesis. I created assignments that asked students to fact-check and copyedit previous students’ bibliography, encyclopaedia, and personography entries (the latter linked to our TEI-encoding projects). I assigned content to students in subsequent semesters to fact-check and copyedit. Students’ metacognitive reflections following this experiment revealed powerful learning outcomes (“Students Reflect on ‘Dangerous Knowledge’”). They found some elements of these assignments tedious in the early stages. But they ultimately recognized that strong research is a process requiring persistence and attention to detail. I have since formalized the process of force-multiplying collaboration, re-assigning student submissions to subsequent classes, or the current project intern. Students who initially create content receive credit on the site as contributors for their term, and tagged in entries with their later editors.
This practice helps students recognize the labor involved in the publication pipeline and their role in it. They are not involved in what David Wiley has called “disposable assignments,” single-use tasks that are graded and thrown away (“What is Open Pedagogy?”). Rather, they are “renewable” ones, defined by Open Education Group as those that “provide students with opportunities to engage in meaningful work, add value to the world, and provide a foundation for future students to learn from and build upon” (“DOER, Designing with OER”). Force-multiplying collaboration in undergraduate research provides the foundation for their peers to learn from and build upon. At the same time, it recognizes their contributions’ value to the larger scholarly community.
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As so many teachers have realized over the past months, building community in online classes is a central challenge, a fact that veteran remote educators have alway known. Unfortunately, many proposed solutions are of the “getting to know each other” variety. But authentic community is created not when students simply know each other but when they share values and goals. And one way to create such shared values and goals is through the course-based undergraduate research experience or “CURE.”
Anyone who has created even a small competitive game in class knows that shared goals can be created entirely artificially. There are wonderful and robust arts and humanities methods that use this strategy such as the Reacting to the Past (RTTP) simulations from Barnard. But because undergraduate research, as defined by CUR, involves “original intellectual or creative contributions to the discipline,” it relies on meaningful goals that go beyond the classroom. Getting students to share those goals means helping them value the arts and humanities themselves, an important learning outcome. Here are some ways to shape your course-based undergraduate research experience for maximum community building.
Make dissemination visible
Look for projects in which dissemination is timely and visible. Many valuable projects in the humanities ask for material from participants that may not see the light of day for years. Contributions to the arts and humanities infrastructure, such databases and curation may not appeal to students who are already experiencing the distancing of remote education. If you do want to use projects like these, seek out opportunities to create immediate feedback, like inviting the director of a project or organization to thank the students and to help them imagine the value of their contributions. Consider whether the project can make any immediate acknowledgment of students while their work is being processed, such as listing them on contributor pages.
Involve a known audience
It is tempting to incorporate creative and scholarly experiences that speak to a national or global audience since that is what faculty themselves consider to be the ultimate audience for any contribution to the field. But valuable work in the arts and humanities can also be directed at more local audiences, especially when the “public humanities” and non-expert audiences are considered. It’s easier for students to feel the reality and immediacy of their work when its audience includes peers, mentors, and family members. Virtual presentation opportunities have actually expanded the possibilities. For example, if students’ work will be part of an online conference, consider requiring them to invite a number of family and friends to listen in.
Give prizes
Creative and scholarly experiences are serious and meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t improved them with a bit of community-building fun, and nothing builds community as fast as friendly competition. Look for opportunities to award non-serious prizes separate from any course related benefits. For example, local groups participating in the annual transcribathon for EMROC may be encouraged by silly prizes awarded for the first person to spot a given word in a manuscript.
Reduce the stakes for collaboration
Collaboration is a powerful tool for building community in any setting because it focuses small groups on shared goals. But when collaboration is also a course expectation it risks working against community through the dreaded “group project” syndrome. High-performing students either worry on the one hand that their performance will be held hostage to that of their peers or on the other hand that they will end up doing all the work. These problems are exacerbated in online classes because students may feel that they have reduced opportunities to encourage each other.
One solution is to make collaboration involve both independent and group responsibility. For example, ask students collaborating on a single scholarly or creative outcome to create their own independent contribution and then to work with others to merge the best aspects of their independent work. Assign course credit based on individual merit for the first part and on participation and engagement for the second part. This reduces the responsibility for effective teamwork while still producing successful outcomes since the best student work will end up in the final product whether or not a group is successful as a team.
Collaborate with undergraduates at other institutions
School spirit doesn’t disappear after high school, and it’s a well-tested way to create a sense of community that can be adapted for undergraduate research experiences. Look for opportunities to pair projects with colleagues at other institutions. Students can make presenting to their peers at other institutions a part of the research experience. Not only is emulation a powerful motivator, but students at each institution will grow closer together as they seek to put their best foot forward.
Have you used CUREs for building community in online classes? Let the CURAH editors know at @curartsandhumanities.org.
The Arts and Humanities Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research
Happily, pages that offer the most opportunity for student research, with text as well as images, are usually less expensive than ones with images alone. Modern ephemera include local newspapers, family photo collections and scrapbooks, posters, campaign materials, etc. 
